D4vd, 21, Faces Murder Trial as Day 2 of Hearing Puts Blood, Money and a Tesla on the Table

The figure that defines this case is not on the docket: a 14-year-old girl named Celeste Rivas Hernandez. She is the reason a 21-year-old pop singer, David Anthony Burke, who performs as D4vd, sat in a Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday for the second day of a preliminary hearing expected to last about four days. He has pleaded not guilty. The question before Judge H. Claire Blackwelder-or whoever presides over the remaining days-is whether the prosecution has enough to send the case to trial. ⁵⁷

Day 1, on Tuesday, opened with the image that has haunted the case since spring: a dismembered corpse shown in court before the victim's parents. The BBC, covering the scene, called the photos the family's "worst nightmare." ³⁶ A detective testified about finding the teen's severed limbs in a Tesla registered to Burke, an account that places the car's interior at the center of the evidence picture. ⁵¹¹

Wednesday shifted the focus from gore to geography. A forensic analyst told the court that multiple sections of a garage where prosecutors believe Burke used a chainsaw to dismember the body carried bloodstain evidence consistent with cutting. ² Prosecutors then walked the court through Burke's money. The picture they assembled: Interscope financial records, a previously unnamed live-in security guard, and airline tickets for a London trip booked from Burke's personal account for himself and Celeste. ⁸¹⁰

A reader who saw our video's auto-caption and stopped there would have walked away with three problems. The caption described the victim as 13; every outlet covering the case names her as 14. ⁴⁹¹⁰ It listed the charged offenses as first-degree murder, lewd acts with a 13-year-old minor, and mutilation of remains. The reporting file covers the case on murder and rape or sexual assault charges, consistent with Burke's April arraignment being described by outlets as "on murder and rape charges." ⁶⁷ No source in the file confirms "lewd acts with a minor" or "mutilation of remains" as charged counts. The caption also flagged a possible death-penalty decision still pending at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. That, too, is not in the reporting we have. The honest read is that those details cannot be verified from the record on hand.

That gap is not a footnote. It is the story's shape. The prosecution is building a case that has to do three things at once: prove Burke killed a 14-year-old, prove the relationship that put him in the same orbit as that 14-year-old, and prove the dismemberment that followed. Wednesday's testimony tried to do all three through paper and plastic: a garage that bled, a Tesla that carried, a personal account that booked two tickets to London.

The Los Angeles courtroom on Wednesday was, in essence, the second act of a story that began when Celeste Rivas Hernandez was found. The first act was the body. The second act is the paper: money moved, tickets booked, a car driven, a garage cut. The third act, the one that decides whether any of this becomes a trial, belongs to the bench.